Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Staunton, October 29 – A Moscow
Jewish writer who attracted international attention three years ago for a column
which declared that anti-Semitism no longer was a problem in the Russian Federation
now says that her own experiences show that tragically this ancient “fear and
hatred” is returning alongside other national hatreds.

In her new
article, she acknowledges that she can’t point to “something concrete” as being
the source of her fears. Rather, she feels this way because of things that in
other situations, she might have dismissed as "insignificant” like “some
kind of caricature,” blog post, or joke in poor taste on television.

But in the
current environment in Russia, Farkash says that she feels what her parents and
grandparents told her about anti-Semitism, and “despite all [her]
cosmopolitanism and general enervation,” she now understands what they told her
and realizes that she faces some of what they had to confront.

Farkash recounts an
anecdote her grandfather liked to tell as indicative of her feelings. According
to his story, an old Armenian who was dying and with tears in his eyes asked
his children to take care of the Jews. His children were shocked by what seemed
to them to be “a strange request.”

But the old Armenian
explained why he had made that request: “Once they finish with [the Jews], they
will immediately come after us!”

Now, the Moscow columnist
says, Jews are in the same position as the old Armenian: they have to speak out
in defense of all the other minorities that are under attack because they know
on the basis of their own experience that after those attacking those people
finish with them, they will come after the Jews.

A decade ago, she
continues, “it was unthinkable that in a normal company a normal person would
say something nationalistic.” But now such remarks have become commonplace. At
first, Farkash said, she tried to argue against them, but now, in the face of
so much hatred, she has just tried to ignore what is being said.

But now she feels that
Jews who do so or who allow national hatreds to be expressed without comment or
reaction “sincerely think that they are special,” that the others are “bad,
criminal, uneducated, and dangerous” and therefore such comments or actions are
all tight. But in fact, these attitudes will ultimately be visited upon Jews as
well.

“The nature of hatred is
such that it does not know logic or arguments,” she writes, and “it easily
shifts from one group to another” because “it always needs some kind of victim.”
To allow it to pass in any case is to allow “the seeds of hatred” to sprout in
one’s own soul, Farkash says.

“At a global level, we
cannot do anything with anti-Semitism: it is, was, and unfortunately will be.”
But one thing everyone has an obligation to do, Farkash concludes, is to
struggle against one’s “own hatred toward others” and not to allow those who
sow hatreds toward any other groups to get away with it without condemnation.